Search This Blog

factors limiting cultural evolution

Will & I took the moms to St. Johann am Pongau. We had dinner with them & then walked around the older part of the town in the rain looking at the views. The clouds were quite high and it was twilight so you could see a light band around the horizon with the alps surrounding us, while darkness was directly overhead.

What was particularly cool was going to a graveyard. I knew one of my Austrian friends told me she visited her grandmother's grave every single week, but I hadn't really realized the consequences of that kind of devotion. Every grave looked fresh although many were decades old, and all were planted with flowers, and most of them had candles lit on them! It was about 10pm, so they must stay lit a long time. I thought it was amazing that most graves had been visited that very day, presumably right after church. There was a vending machine for candles, and almost all the graves have red glass candleholders to shelter them from wind & rain.

Oddly, one of these carefully-kept graves had a statue of an angel on it, but the angel was entirely covered with ivy except for one hand and its wings! It was kind of cool looking. I guess the family didn't really care for the statue.

Monday we went to Salzburg. I had heard so much about it being amazingly beautiful that it was a little bit disappointing -- it wasn't necessarily prettier than Bath or Vienna. But it was very cool & the old town really reminded me of every movie you've ever seen about Mozart. I think it would be a great place to live or to raise kids. "We" was Will & I & Patricia. There is a huge white fort overlooking the town on a hill you can see from the train, and I thought we'd never go that far, but in fact the old town is well beyond the station & at the foot of this hill, so in the end we did go up to it. Wikipedia says it is one of the best-preserved castles in Europe. It was from around 1000AD, a lot of the work is from 1400 though. It belonged to arch-bishops but they were also really princes then & quite involved in trying to be both politically & religiously somewhat independent.

Anyway, the main thing I am working on this week is a talk. Normally when I give talks I revise & extend existing ones, since work tends to build on previous work. But in this case I am really writing it from scratch, because it is focussed on all new things I have done & learned since I have been here. So I expect it will take 12-18 hours to write.

Dad asked for a summary -- well, I have already written an abstract, so I will put that here as the summary:

Dear friend of the KLI,

We kindly invite you to participate in our next BrownBag Discussion ("bring your own lunch, sit back, enjoy the talk, and join us in the discussion"):

Thursday 5 June, 1.15 p.m.

JOANNA BRYSON

(KLI and University of Bath)

"What limits the biological evolution of cultural evolution? Modularity in evolution and learning"

Abstract

Since Darwin first presented the theory of natural selection, scientific (and other) debate has focussed around whether this simple process can explain the level of diversity we witness in nature. Recently, EvoDevo has focussed research on the way modularity is used to develop complexity. The primary research questions here are both proximate: how modules differentiate themselves from homogeneous initial conditions, and ultimate: why is this a useful strategy? These questions can equally be applied to the interacting systems that provide intelligent behavior: biological evolution, cultural evolution and individual learning.

My initial interest in cultural evolution arose from an intuitive dislike of one strand of research on language origins, which suggested that language was "extra-Darwinian" because it requires the evolution of altruism. In previous work (Cace and Bryson 2007) I have shown that altruistic communication is easily evolved. Since coming to the KLI I have come to better understand the mechanisms behind this. My talk includes a brief review this work.

What then limits the extent to which species utilise culture for rapidly evolving intelligent behavior? I believe there are a number of mechanisms:

Speed vs Reliability trade-offs: These tradeoffs are fairly well understood when applied to modular learning systems in individuals --- particularly short term and long term learning and memory. I believe similar concerns apply here.

The Baldwin effect: The mechanisms which shape evolution (including the speed of change in the environment) determine what will in the long term be encoded genetically and what left to individual learning. I believe this statement can be extended to include the third process of cultural evolution.

Niche size and competition with other species: I believe the advantage of the cognitive strategy given its costs and benefits are more limited than we tend to realize.

Representational issues: Just as biological complexity has been dependent on the evolution of genetic representations for modular and hierarchical instructions, so cultural complexity is limited by the capacity to transmit not only quantity but structure. I hypothesize about representational advantages humans have over other species for the evolution of languages (c.f. Bryson 2007; 2008).

In my talk I present these factors and my evidence for them to date. I welcome feedback and additional references as this is very much work in progress.

Joanna Bryson is a member of faculty at the University of Bath in the department of Computer Science. She holds degrees in Artificial Intelligence from MIT (PhD) and Edinburgh (MSc), and Psychology from Edinburgh (MPhil) and Chicago (BA). She is currently on sabbatical at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, studying factors limiting the biological evolution of cultural evolution. She is also a visiting research fellow at the University of Nottingham Methods and Data Institute.

Popular Posts

Since our Science paper came out it's been evident that people are surprised that machines can be biased. They assume machines are necessarily neutral and objective, which is in some sense true -- in the sense that there is no machine perspective or ethics. But to the extent an artefact is an element of our culture, it will always reflect bias.

I think the problem is that people mistake computation for math. Math really is pure, has certain truth, it's eternal, it would be the same without any particular sentient species looking at it. That's because math is an abstraction that doesn't exist in the real world. Computation is a physical process. It takes time, energy, and space. Therefore it is resource constrained. This is true whether you are talking about natural or artificial intelligence. From a computational perspective there's little difference between these.

People are smart because we are able to exploit the selected "best of" other people…

The good news: We know where word meanings come from
We have a paper in Science,Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human biases (a green open access version is hosted at Bath). What this paper shows is that you can find the implicit biases humans have just by learning semantics from our language. We showed this by using machine learning of semantics from the language on the Web, and comparing that to implicit biases psychologists have documented using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT uses reaction times to show that people find it easier to associate some things than others. For example, it's easier to associate flowers with pleasant terms and bugs with unpleasant terms than the other way around. Notice that the actual statistics underlying the IAT is always about these slightly complicated, dual relative measures. It's easier to: group {flowers and pleasant terms} together, AND {unpleasant terms and insect names} (both those groupin…

When Demis Hassabis said he would join Google if they didn't work with the US military, I told BBC Newsnight that this was a red herring. "Murder kills five times more people than war" was a short way to say there's a lot more to ethics than just avoiding the military, an obvious example being avoiding selling arms to paramilitaries (or school children.) In fact, many military officers often really are major advocates for peace and stability, including policies like reducing developing-world diseases and poverty because they contribute to instability.

But by far the worst and most disturbing thing I heard in the many AI policy meetings I was invited to attend last year was in the only one in the US. That was the Artificial Intelligence and Global Security Summit on Nov 1, 2017 in Washington, DC, hosted by the Center for a New American Security. Note: the CNAS have videos and transcripts of all the talks and discussions linked on that page.